For a little while, I’ve been surprised by popups on my blog site dpod.kakelbont.ca (tl;dr: they don’t happen any more because I removed the SweetCaptcha plugin).

I’m not quite sure the contexts in which I’d been seeing them, but for whatever reason I thought they were coming as an artefact of something else: a bottom banner on my cellphone that I was accidentally touching or something similar.

But today it became clear that there really was Something Amiss. When I checked on both Chrome and Firefox, it was happening the first time I clicked on any page link in my site. It took a little while googling for a solution (turns out a lot of people want popups to appear in their Wordpress sites and most things I found were about how to make them happen).

This week I have been gathering sources for the pieces in our Cædmon bibliography. This is not a speedy task by any means! I admit that I have felt a bit impatient with myself and have been concerned that I should be at the point where I am gathering data by now, but I try to remind myself that it is important to make sure that we have a complete pool of sources from which to pull data, otherwise people could poke holes in our findings when we are all done. All of the proper experimental procedures that I learned way back in 7th grade science fair still apply here!

Dan gave me the key to the Digital Humanities lab on Monday, and I was able to go in and dig through Rachel’s drawer in the filing cabinet from last summer. I was excited to find that she had a ton of articles in there that simply need to be scanned. This will be time consuming, but worth it to have them all organized in the GLOBUS folder and accessible to everyone in our group. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a preliminary syllabus based on Spring 2015. While it provides an indication of how the course will be assessed and the scheduling of readings, details of both will change before the beginning of class. The required reading list is accurate and complete for Fall 2016, however.

English 3401 introduces students to the study of Middle English literature (i.e. literature from roughly the twelfth through the end of the fifteenth centuries). The course is a companion to English 3601 Chaucer, and so this course concentrates on literature by authors other than Chaucer.

Painfully short blog entry this week, I’m afraid. A lot has been accomplished this week, but there is not a lot to report.

The bibliography has been completed, with the final count being approximately 700 pieces of Cædmon scholarship. This number may increase or decrease as I read through the actual works. Some may have nothing to do with Cædmon (I erred on the side of having to much rather than too little), and others may point me in the direction of something I might have missed.

I recently switched to using Microsoft’s Outlook Web Application (OWA), a component of Office 365) for my email.

This was not something I wanted to do, but I am working extremely hard at delegating secretarial tasks to free up writing and research time and since OWA is what the university uses, and since I can’t forward my university’s voicemail to Gmail, switching to OWA makes the most sense in terms of allowing a proxy to handle most of my email.

This blog comes to you a day later than usual, as Friday’s work ended up taking a lot longer than I thought and I ran out of time! To be honest, this week was spent much like last week: checking our Zotero bibliography against other bibliographies of Cædmon scholarship.

I ended up re-doing a bit of my work from last week, as I learned in my meeting with Dan on Monday that our scope was a bit wider than I had previously thought. I was worried that I had not been considering certain entries in the various bibliographies to be “about Cædmon enough”, so I decided to go through the entries again and add some that I may have missed. It makes sense to add more rather than less, as I can simply remove an article from the list if I read it and realise it has nothing to do with Cædmon. At the moment our bibliography is almost complete, and we have nearly 700 entries!

The context

I use hypothes.is for annotating PDFs (and websites). This works best, however, if the PDFs are online somewhere.

I use Zotero and Paperpile for citation management. Zotero in particular, stores all the PDFs that I collect via my bibliography locally in a very fragmented directory structure (each entry in the bibliography manager is its own directory, meaning in my case, the PDFs are spread over 7000 sub-directories.

I also have a much better understanding of the economics of it. This blog posting is a note about how it works.

A reminder of the problem

First a reminder of the basic issue: I believe that students tend to seize up from traditional grading mechanisms that rate them from Excellent to Poor. At the University of Lethbridge, this method causes students to become intellectually defensive and conservative to an extend I consider an academic offence: they are so scared of bad grades that they would rather do what they think you want than what they think is interesting, correct, or advances knowledge—an approach that I find difficult to distinguish from plagiarism in terms of its effect on the advancement of knowledge.

Another short post this week, but I will try to make up for it by posting more than one blog next week as I get further and further into the project!

Most of this week was spent methodically checking our body of Cædmon scholarship against various databases (all listed in my previous post). I felt a bit bad that it was going so slowly, as I do not want to lollygag in my work at all. Several things seemed to make the task slower than I hoped, however.

First of all, when I started going through the lists I would try and find access to each article or book that was missing from our body of scholarship as I became aware of it. I soon abandoned this practice and decided that I would create a running list of what we are missing FIRST, and then find access to these pieces as my next step. Read the rest of this entry »

About Daniel Paul O’Donnell

I am a Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge, where I teach and conduct research in the Digital Humanities, Digital Cultural Heritage, English Philology, and Book History. You can read more about me by following this link.

My university site (which contains syllabi and the like) can be found by following this link. Most of the non-course related material from that site can be found here.